Southern Avenue Spreads The Good News

There were times when it seemed that the stage was too small for Tierinii Jackson on the weekend of her band Southern Avenue’s album release party. As she belted out the raucous “No Time To Lose,” the diminutive lead singer with a soaring soprano was a gyrating tour de force, the red streaks of her curls flying every which way as she kicked  her legs about, seemingly using up all the muscles of her body.

The singer would have raised the rafters were there some in Jammin’ Java, the intimate music room nestled in a non-descript suburban strip mall outside Washington, DC. When she raised her finger and pointed above she was trying to get every intonation out of the romantic plea “Love Me Right,” a song with a rich storied r & b legacy that already feels like a timeworn classic.

The expressive front person who hinted at Beyoncé’s  athleticism and the pedigree of a singer with the name Franklin, was the foil for the wonderfully understated but rip-roaring band worthy of being on Stax Records. It was easy to imagine Southern Avenue as a house band in their native Memphis or Muscle Shoals in the glory days of the Sixties, sent back to the future to save us from inauthenticity and our collective hurt. When Jackson prefaced the song “Peace Will Come” with a intro about love and equality, she was like a torchbearer of the human struggle, just dropping in on the neighborhood to spread some good news.

Her songwriting partner and lead guitarist Ori Naftaly’s Fender was stickered all over with the slogan Bring The Blues Alive most prominent. The Israeli native and Memphis transplant played off the keyboardist Jeremy Powell who dazzled unassumingly without any pretenses–stretching the keyboard with his fingers and the palm of his hand for classic fills. Sometimes Naftaly led, often he followed with he and Powell picking up tempo with the propulsive drumming of Jackson’s sister Tikyra. It reached a climax during “No Time To Lose” with his harrowing guitar underscoring Jackson’s emphatic shrieks in her blow-off to a lover.

She kicked the band into drive on the funk soul of “Slipped, Tripped and Fell In Love” and  her sister’s homesick blues narrative and  romp “80 Miles From Memphis.”  But much of the night she stepped back providing rich timbre and playing off the quintet’s innate musical vocabulary. When the sisters harmonized together during “It’s Gonna Be Alright.” it was like somewhere between being in church and daydreaming to the sound of the Beatles rooftop concert and the groove of “Don’t Let Me Down.”

Much to their credit Southern Avenue’s show stood on its own without the horns that buttress their debut album. Instead imagination intuitively filled in the sounds of the grooves where horns blew.

By the show’s end, Jackson had  a message to impart,  reminding everyone that no matter how things get, we shopuld not despair.  She turned the mic on the audience, asking us to clap in unison and sing the chorus of Naftaly’s song “Don’t Give Up” that opens the album. It felt like some ancient chant that had been handed down through hard times and the ages, seasoned and ready to be sung again for struggles that lay ahead.